Hope is the opiate of the masses!
It is hope that is the opiate of the masses. Existence is an instrumental thing. We survive, to survive, to survive. We entertain, to entertain, to kill time, and not be bored. We are deprived and need to have our desires fulfilled to have yet other desires. What keeps this whole instrumental affair going? Hope is that carrot. The transcendental (i.e. big picture) view of the absurdity of the instrumental affair of existence is lost as we focus on a particular goal/set of goals that we think is the goal.. We think this future state of goal-attainment will lead to something greater than the present. Hope lets us get caught up in the narrow focus of the pursuit of the goal. But then, if we get the goal, another takes its place. The instrumental nature of things comes back into view as we contend with restlessness. Then, we narrow our focus (yet again) to pursue (yet again) what is hoped to be a greater state than the present. The cycle continues.
Comments (179)
From the Tao Te Ching:
Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.
What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.
What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don't see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.
What translation of the Tao Te Ching is that from?
Alan Watts:
While there is life there is hope—and if one lives on hope, death is indeed the end.
We are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later. ‘There’s a good time coming be it ever so far away'—that one far-off divine event to which all creation moves. Don’t kid yourself. As the Hindus have taught us, in the course of time everything gets worse. It eventually falls apart. Comes Kali-Yuga and Shiva at the end and POOM! Which is to say, only suckers put hope in the future. ”
I just got it off the web, but I think it's Stephen Mitchell's
Yet that is the driver of our continuance on the cycle. No one can really avoid it. The strain of the instrumental nature of existence would be too much without...something. It could be the weekend, the tribal ceremony, that hunt, that X entertainment, that relationship. You name it, you are hoping for something. No one is above it. Sagely words don't negate its affect on the average (read all) humans living.
Hope is expectation. Expectations can be realistic or not. If the latter, it leads to a downward spiral...into pain, suffering and despair. If it is the former then you're in sync with the truth - reality - and the cycle is merry go round. What do you think?
But then another goal takes its place. And another. It is not whether you achieve the goal that I'm getting at, but the insatiableness of goals, the neverending quality, and their instrumental nature. Also, its ability to narrow our focus so we don't see the absurd instrumental nature of the repetition. It's an opiate indeed.
It is despair is the opium of the pessimist. Isn't this just as fair?
Quoting schopenhauer1
There's lots of truth up there, but I'd have to stress that the instrumental theory is itself a work of creativity. You're still scratching an itch with it, enjoying yourself as a possessor of truth. I share that truth with you. Sure, it's all futile. We eat only to get hungry, fall in love only to take that lover for granted, make intellectual discoveries only to find them banal in the long run. We are like sharks. We must keep moving.
But a certain kind of lifestyle is so engrossing that one doesn't reflect on this futility much. One swings from object to object, becoming more complex and skilled at pursuit. I don't see how the "ultimate futility" makes life more or less valuable in itself. We could just as easily be grateful that the wicked human heart is insatiable. In Brave New World, they chew aphrodisiac chewing gum. Why? Because lots of sex is available in the world of Find The Zipper. So appetite is desirable. Indeed, lust and hunger are even enjoyable when mixed with the pleasure of anticipation.
This is a very comforting view of hopelessness. The comfort of this view actually creates it's own sense of hope.
Pessimists have hope just as much. No one is excluded.
Quoting t0m
Well, what does an opiate do? It dulls the mind. It makes one not see the bigger picture. One is trapped in the narrow confines of each opium den of the new hopeful pursuit. It is just another and another and another. Whether you use terms like grateful for the wicked insatiable human heart, doesn't negate the situation any more than "challenges need to be overcome to make life better" does. If you are alive, human, and self-reflecting, this is your situation. Slap on as many terms as you'd like to make spin it a certain way, but it is just one damn goal after the other, and the hope that a future state will be better. Otherwise, the situation would be too stark to fully manage.
As I said, the pessimist is just as hopeful as the next guy.
That pessimist sounds like you given the OP; yes/no?
Is this a response to me? If so, just your ideas. You seem to find hope in hopelessness.
As I said, no one escapes hope. That's also part of the theory. Those who do are are probably no longer here or in paralyzing depression. Also, Schopenhauer was considered THE pessimist philosopher.
So what do you find hope in? Since you're still here.
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.[2]
But "trapped" implies an unpleasant situation. I don't think your description is incorrect. I just think you are adding a value judgment to an otherwise accurate description.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But you're missing that enjoying the cycle means the situation doesn't "ask for" negation. For 10 years now I've been a "nihilist" in recognizing nothing absolute in the world. Indeed, this negation of the world is (for me) the absolute itself. By identifying with disidentification itself, man becomes transcendence incarnate.So by no means am I afraid of understanding you here. I'm not squeamish about the futility of human existence. It's part of my persona, living with this knowledge and the distance from mortal things it provides those who can accept their mortality.
I agree with what you imply, that we "slap on terms" in order to cope with reality. But I radicalize this theory. Even the grim "truth" of futility can function as an erotic object or power play. Pessimism is sexy.
Occasionally I feel world-weary. Occasionally (especially if I get sick), I get disgusted with life. So these modes appear, and it's easy to abstractly assent to my death in such modes. But for the most part the game is too absorbing. I have projects to bring to fruition. We can call the projects an illusion or the sense of futility an illusion. We'd just be privileging one mode over the other. Both modes are real. To project a dominant abstraction is arguably to reduce the real for a moment's purpose.
I see your edit. As someone also trapped in paralyzing depression, my question still stands.
How is that relevant to the claim that hope is the opiate of the masses? You assume I have a way out of it or something. This is not meant to fully mimic Marx, in that he had a purported solution to the opiate (religion) which was Communism. I am just saying that this is how we operate. We can see the situation, but despite it, hope is what drives us through what otherwise would be unbearable instrumentality.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Indeed, Marx was pedelling a new opiate of hope in Communism. Same bullshit, different name. A better state will come.
You said no one escapes hope, which includes you. So a logical follow up question is, "what do you find hope in?" Since you haven't, presumably, escaped hope (via your own admission). So, it's relevant, in that it places you within those masses, rather than without.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't assume that of you personally, but it's inherent in your argument, yes.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's an interesting idea; do you think driving through that has a telos? Or any kind of meaning you'd like to assign it?
Also, I noticed your edit about paralyzing depression. I have it, and am currently wrestling it. I'm responding here, emotionally, because I'm with you, not because I think your ideas are inherently wrong.
By trapped, I mean, it narrows the focus- like opium. Quoting t0m
So you are just reiterating what I said. Hope moves us along through the instrumental nature of reality. Sometimes you see it for what it is, but probably not very long. You get swept in some other hope, perhaps some Nietzschean notion of the erotic object or power play. As you indicate, the premise stands, and you are simply supplying some good examples in your own hopefulness in Nietzchean (or whatever you want to call it) philosophy.
So what do you think that means?
If by telos you mean purpose, I'd have to know what more you mean. It's a way we get through the day. There is some goal, outcome, event, that will take place. It is extremely hard to function when there is not this. As you and others have pointed out, even Sisyphus smiling at his own futility is hope. It is hope in the living out of the futility. Hope of the hopeless futility. But usually don't live in that realm, they live in the realm of smaller goals as, once they hit the wall of futility, more goals fill its place. Restlessness churning.
Yes, I agree with the basic structure. But "seeing it for what it is" is also part of the structure. This vision of instrumentality is itself instrumentality. It is itself wishful thinking, even if it hurts, perhaps especially because it hurts. I don't know about you, but I was raised beneath a crucified God. So these dark visions remind me of the self-crucifixion of the spirit. Nietzsche is apt. This is festival of cruelty. Society can't do much to stop us from self-cruelty. It's erotic.
Assuming that this is the THE TERRIBLE TRUTH, where does that put us? Or you in particular? You are the one who sees the face of God, and it is death to look upon the face of God. It may hurt. You may be terribly unhappy. But such suffering is ennobled by possession of this Truth, God's (or Reality's) actual, terrible face.
I'm not saying that this isn't the truth, but it's just a truth among others. If we are as humans fundamentally the desire for recognition or status (Kojeve's notion), then there's just more than one strategy. And to me this "status lust" is prior to instrumentality, or includes it. The theory of instrumentality is itself an instrument for status. That's my theory. But that theory too is a questionable instrument of status, which my anti-faith bids me to not completely identify with.
It's your business, but maybe your lifestyle isn't what it should be. My physical/economic lifestyle changed while my "metaphysics" stayed the same and I became much happier. The little details add up to making the endless cycle worth repeating -- at least for now, while I'm young-middle-aged.
Yeah, even worse than Schopenhauer's negation of Will is Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. That truly is a horror. One is quiescence, the other is manic life sentence. The eternal vigilance of being.
Quoting t0m
The point again, is hope gives us the narrow focus we need to not constantly bear the world in its full instrumental nature. It provides the ship its ballast. Status may be something that we do in a society, but that is more an epiphenomenon of being a social creature and is a secondary effect, and not an underlying factor in why we continue at a fundamental level. Status is not only getting caught up in goals, but taking them seriously.
Gotta have hope. Indeed. Upgrade the opium.
Almost; I mean a defining purpose. Something foundational. The hope that turns out to be nothing, which gives way to a false hope, needs to give way to an unexpected hope. Otherwise, suicide is the logical solution. I hate to admit this, but I'm with Camus, but only provisionally. A purpose has to mean something that connects to the experience of life, in all it's fullness, suffering, and nihilism.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But that's not what I intended to point out. I'm saying that, if you find comfort in recognizing the hopelessness of the false hopes mankind sets for itself, you've found the deeper ground for hope itself. That ground is deeper than the over-cited ground of Camus's fake Sisyphus. You descry the failure of hope out of your own hope. Hope only means something to you out of your own sense of hope.
So no, "hope of the hopeless futility" is not hope; just listen to yourself, man. "Hope of the hopeless futility"?
True. This is in fact the insatiable will, Schopenhauer describes. There is an aesthetic beauty in understanding this. I've always claimed that there is a sort of aesthetic pessimism, when one keeps in the forefront the instrumental nature of things. Schop would say to then become an ascetic and turn away from the will- negating it. One might say that is its own form of hope (the escape from the hope-cycle). I think greater awareness of it through dialogue like this has a form of consolation involved. There is something said about coming to the same understanding of life as another person and not deluding it down because the insight does not fit with the very hope-cycle it wish's to explain. So yes, it is comforting, in a way it is. I never refuted that, and even said that was one thing pessimism can offer, a sobering but at least somewhat comforting idea that can be shared with those who are aware of the aesthetic vision it provides.
Communism in the Soviet Union turned out very badly, but there is still something very worthwhile in his view of religion. People need an opiate -- not Fentanyl, but an anodyne, if they are going to live in this wretched world, "this vale of tears". The hope, though, is not to push more dope, but to do something about the wretched world.
The thing with feathers is not a supernatural beast. Perhaps, it is the hope that springs eternal in the heart, that keeps us going.
Despair, depression, gloom, futility, darkness... all dull our capacity to feel hope. Some of this we can not help, and some of it we can.
That rhetoric doesn't deflate me. I know that game backwards and forwards. I've played it. I've been the "dark truth" guy for decades. I note that you neglect the essence of my critique, which was to instrumentalize your instrumentalism. From over here, you're clinging to your view every bit as dogmatically as I cling to my notion of myself as fundamentally glad to be alive. I decided to give "trying" a try, improved my circumstances, got a good "intellectual" job, blah blah blah. So life is better.
Your view is so stubbornly hopeless that it's almost a refutation of itself. You don't seem to be spending much time in the hope part of the cycle. Is hope even the right word? Concerned, engaged, fascinated. You write as if the process itself was meaningless or devoid of pleasure. Yet it's a cliche among artists that the act of creation is the true thrill. It's even an Aerosmith lyric that "life's a journey, not a destination." So a happy rock song (which I don't like, since I'm a music snob) encapsulates your view, demonstrating, arguably, that your value-interpretation is an add-on.
But then, this just belies the instrumental nature of existence. If we cut the bullshit out of most ethical systems- it is based on helping others who are in need (materially, emotionally, mentally, etc.) without impinging on other's rights (as much as possible) in the process. But what is this then for? What if we are all at a state where we do not need to be helped or help others? Hope of something better provides the impetus. But really we are doing to do to do, entertaining to entertain, etc. Survival in a historocultural setting on one hand (navigate those institutions of culture to survive), maintain comfort levels, and we must be entertained. But we do not like to see the barebones churning of this striving but for nothing. We need hope so that we can move through it and narrow the focus.
I'm a bit annoyed that you chose the most emotional and least philosophical point I made for your response; but in the spirit of free speech I'll go with it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You need to define beauty as something inherently hopeless, then. Or inherently futile, or whatever. And not on Shopee's terms; on your own.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, you need to either re-define hope, or re-phrase. Schopee likes paradoxes, but they only work when intuition validates them.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It may for you, but that's a form of escapism.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So, not deluding down someone else's hope-cycle?
Quoting schopenhauer1
My problem here is that you're a soft-core pessimist. You can't have comfort and pessimism at the same time.
If I may put this in more vulgar terms, we are fucking to fuck, as well. We are eating to eat. We are sleeping to sleep. Entertaining, by the way, is fun when it's done well. Who doesn't like making others laugh or dazzling them? We like these things. We want to repeat them. Those who don't fear hellfire (or death as eternal sleep) fear death as the loss of this opportunity to repeat the same old pleasures. They also fear the loss of the personal growth interrupted by death. Maybe this just means becoming a better philosopher, writing that great book one day. You can tell them that they'll just want something else, after, and they'll say: great. Let's repeat the game of hide and seek. Because they are in the habit of successfully satisfying their desires. So desire is an opportunity for pleasure, which is distinctly a positive, and not just the cessation of a pain.
Where does 'meaning' fit into this. Hope seems like that dopamine release from the presynaptic channel to the postsynapses, while meaning is the response one gets from that 'hope'. Or is it the other way around?
Hope without meaning seems linked to such a degree that talking about one without the other what the elephant in the room is like to not be spoken of.
Well, there is the aesthetic of seeing the "what actually is going on here", which can be said to be the instrumentality of things. I don't mean aesthetic as beauty per se, just a kind of understanding that takes place based on envisioning the structure that is going on.
Quoting Noble Dust
Indeed it is. But there's not much more bottom you can go other than trying to manically make into something to embrace pace Nietzsche.
Quoting Noble Dust
Eh, I mean there's only so "meta" you can get. Once you see the hope-cycle, it doesn't go further back. You either find comfort in it, or you don't and you move on to some hopeful this or that. But that would just be reiterating the point :D.
Quoting Noble Dust
It is just part of the ethical aspect I guess. Pessimism can provide consolation. We are all instrumental and we can recognize it, discuss it, understand it. I guess there's not much more than that to do with it. The whole point is, we usually have to move away from languishing in it, as there is nowhere else to go except to hope for some other things. What I don't think will happen is that we abandon and still play the game. If we are playing the game, there is probably some hope there. Perhaps there is something to be said about the self-awareness of this though.
Again, this just reiterates the point. I don't disagree this is what we do. You can't see the light for too long, as you implied, it will just burn. I think the whole personal growth thing is just part of the need for need of novelty. The constant satiation needs to be satisfied indeed.
The meaning is in the hope. Hope is long-lasting as it never stops. Achieving a goal is fleeting as it simply leads to more goals, and more. We are never satisfied, always deprived.
I'm with you, but it sounds like we disagree about the nature of that instrumentality.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There seems to be a typo in there; want to re-phrase?
Quoting schopenhauer1
"Hopeful this or that" being more fake hope, or what? Again, where does suicide play in here?
Quoting schopenhauer1
The ethical aspect of what?
Quoting schopenhauer1
How? (You're following paragraph doesn't give me much.)
Eternal recurrence is a good mention. At this point, I'd say yes. That would mean going through hell again, but it would also mean going through intensities of pleasure in discovery that are hard to match these days. Falling in love for the first time again, for instance. Jesus, what drug compares to that? But it was Hell, too, before I came to "self-possession" and "transcendence." But knowing that I would find myself again would make being thrown back in the maze acceptable.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't understand why the "full instrumental nature" of the world would be unpleasant. I just can't see the Hell in it.
For me status especially includes how we see ourselves. When we're young, this is indeed especially social. We need parents and peers to validate us. But as we attain independence and authenticity, we judge ourselves by our own standards. This explains the sociopath as well as the revolutionary philosopher and artist. Men even die for "honor," not so much because of what others think of them, necessarily, but for fear of how they would think of themselves after cowardly submission.
So status involves the image of virtue that as functional is exactly what we take most seriously. Both of us are philosophical types, so it's no surprise that we verbalize these images of virtue, more or less explicitly. You are the guy who publicly takes your position, and I have decided to publicly take mine. We are performing and implying "what is [truly] noble."
I don't think the light burns. Or it doesn't burn everyone. Some will be offended by a vision of futility and repetition. I'll grant you that. But others make a career of poeticizing it (Sarte, Schopenhauer, etc.) And there's a market for it, so it doesn't burn everyone. For some it's just more spice.
Yes the need for novelty is there. But is need shameful in itself? Is that the problem? The indignity of being an incarnate, needy being? Feuerbach called us "porous" gods. We have holes to fill and empty, fill and empty. This is absurd from one perspective and yet often enjoyable. I do think philosophers tend to want to be godlike statues, immobile and impermeable in the bliss of their wisdom.
What is the problem here? Circularity, not the logical kind, is part of nature...the planets revolve around the sun, biochemistry is full of chemical cycles. In fact I think cycles, of any kind, are an ineluctable part of our reality. Why point a finger at a very fundamental characteristic of nature itself and rue over it? I think this type of thinking, pitting unrealistic expectations against ''brute facts'' of nature, can serve only as a well of pain and suffering. What we should do is seek the truth and adapt to it, which you're not doing(?)
I don't know which is more absurd, life itself or people who think its absurd because it doesn't match their expectations?
It is kind of like t0m's philosophy if you look at his responses. He is trying to out Schopenhauer Schopenhauer by embracing the instrumental nature of things. Pain is good because it is challenging, so the line of thinking goes. If you were to Eternally Return to life over and over and over, you would say a resounding YES. These themes of embracing pain as it makes you better, and the Eternal Recurrence are Nietzsche's ideas essentially. He is trying to meta the meta, if you will. As I responded to t0m, this philosophy seems abhorrent to me. That conception would mean we would live an Ever Vigilant Existence where we never get any (metaphysical) rest. Also, to say that the challenges of life makes one better, seems a coping mechanism. Why do people need to be born to face challenges in the first place? Again, the instrumental nature of things makes this line of thinking suspect. It is post facto rationalizing of a situation that is already set from circumstances of birth. It is the only thing to say in the face of this, even it is just a thing to say, as there is no alternative except seeing it in its truly negative light. So Nietzscheans go on trying toincorporate challenges, set-backs, and suffering into the hope-cycle. Nietzsche was the ultimate in doing this, thus his wide appeal. A philosophy for the manically life-affirming- like someone who had a lot of cocaine and wanders the mountainous Swiss countryside for a half day and then goes back to the realities that are life and lives out what is really going on- the instrumentality of doing to do to do- surviving, discomfort, boredom, hope-cycle repeat.
Quoting Noble Dust
That is not going to be an option for most people. I also want to be delicate about this issue because I don't know your state of mind. I'd say there is some comfort in understanding the aesthetics in what is going on. t0m does have a point in terms that there is a dark sense of consolation in the knowledge of the instrumentality. The hard part is maintaining the vision without backing down, without letting the burn force you into a Nietzchean mania, or trying to ignore it and anchor yourself firmly in the goals.
We are part of nature, but the only ones who can see what is going on as well, so it is not as cut as dry. We live out the cycle, yet see that it is a cycle. And we can also see it is one of deprivation- the need for more need, and the hope that carries us along to the next need. It is viciously repetitious, even in its novelty (the repetition of trying novelty even). But I guess the main response here is that, unlike the rest of nature (and I agree we are fully a part of nature; a truism) is that we can self-reflect on it and see the instrumentality. We are not geese who just fly South every winter and scavenge for morsels of worms without reflecting on it. We can see our situation while we live it out- the only animal to do so on Earth.
But I place my hope in God. That means I place my hope in something that I cannot imagine, nor expect in this life. Indeed, my hope is beyond this life, and cannot be attained within it. It is the hope for the beyond - the hope the valiant warrior experiences as he lays completely exhausted on the field of battle - whether victorious or defeated, for things don't look much different then.
Quoting t0m
Libidus Dominandi
Quoting Noble Dust
We are all trapped in depression for one reason or another - some are just less aware of their depression. There are also healthy people, but they are not here. We probably never met a healthy person, because Western society has become very corrupt. We look around, and there are only blind men leading the blind. It is our historical era.
Quoting schopenhauer1
His vision is nothing but the will to power, as I mentioned before. He has this in common with Hegel and Kojeve, both of whom did not care for truth, but for power. Man had to become God, man had to dominate, to become the transcendent.
Quoting Noble Dust
It is like looking at a red vase, and suddenly seeing it yellow. This is the radical cognitive change the whole Western world is looking for, scrambling for, and unable to find it. It is not a different experience, but a different way of experiencing.
Quoting Bitter Crank
To what end? Suppose we fix the world, and it is now a heaven. What will we do then? Utopia is meaningless - cannot exist in this world, only in another world - in heaven - can we hope for such a thing.
Quoting t0m
Which just proves that your initial 'rational' theory about life was wrong.
Quoting t0m
And what greater, worse and less merciless fear is there than the fear that you cannot repeat the same old pleasures ad infinitum? Indeed, Nietzsche's great eternal recurrence must have been nothing but the desire of a miser - just more life ad infinitum - the same old small pleasure, but don't take them away from me.
Quoting t0m
Memory, the past, time - they are all a bondage. True freedom is the letting go of memory, of the past, of all of it, and looking at things afresh.
Quoting t0m
True. Socrates.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is not rest that people are searching for - it is that infinite zest of the child, the sense of possibility, the breaking out from one's conditioning, one's past, one's prison - seeing the world aright.
For example. I am world-weary, but it's not because I want some metaphysical rest. No - it's because things are too hard, things are too impossible given my situation, things appear fixed and immobile. So I have to do things by pushing myself, by forcing myself. I guess that this is so for every young person. If one looks in one's past, one has achieved so much, it seems impossible to ever have been achieved. It really does. If I think about doing all that I have done in the past again - I will say it is impossible. This is world-weariness - the feeling of impossibility, of being stuck. Just imagining for a second - the horror of so many years spent in school - so much work, and one is still just at the bottom of the mountain. The horror of having to spend again so much time, and so little progress. Being at the bottom of the mountain and looking up is depressing - it makes one feel that it is impossible to climb, and so one never climbs. And inversely - once at the top, the entire climb looks to have been impossible, unimaginable - a miracle!
André Agassi was a great tennis player. But he hated it. Why? Because it takes so much work, and yet, so little progress compared to the work. So slow - to toil for so long, only for a few moments of greatness. And one never wanted to toil in the first place - rather one must be forced, otherwise it is impossible to be great. Whether one forces oneself, or circumstances force one - great achievement is always forced and pushed. It takes so long - there is simply too much work to be done.
Reifying achievement through hard work. Just another example of yet another goal to hope for.
I'm not entirely convinced of that. Schopenhauer is invariably referenced in these discussions, but he would maintain that salvation is possible, and I agree with him. He may have been confused or mistaken about the mechanism and precise character of salvation, but that it is possible he demonstrates to my satisfaction. If salvation is possible, then it is rational to hope for. Thus, a hopeless world is not one your namesake and inspiration proposes, at the very least. If you have moved beyond him in this regard, it is apparently in the direction of nihilism.
I sympathize with his idea that we must turn away from our own will and diminish its hold. However, I have always maintained skepticism of its possibility. By skepticism, I mean pretty 0% chance. If we are alive, we are willing. At best, it is similar to a therapeutic technique.
The point was the expectation is a driving force that prevents despair, even from seeing the very human condition of instrumentality.
I know from personal experience that you are incorrect. Giving up hope is not that difficult for me, although I'm far from perfect. Now, giving up fear, for me that's the hard part.
Do you hope to do that? :P
I'm afraid that I won't be able to.
If I had one wish, it would be to be fearless. Do I hope to be fearless? Here's what I've learned in 65 years - You can have anything you want. All you have to do is stop wanting it.
Lao Tzu was a smart guy.
This really is the heart of Alan Watts' view of the world. I think it was in "The Wisdom of Insecurity." It was one of his first books before he became more and more hippy dippy. At that point in his life he was a lapsed Anglican who was homesick and trying to figure out how to mix what he loved about Christianity with what he was learning about eastern religions and philosophies.
My God, this is like four Eeyores at a cocktail party.
You guys are all claiming to speak for humanity when you're really only speaking from your own self-indulgent despair. No, we are all not trapped in depression. Some people feel that they are in a beautiful universe that we were created to live in. Some of us feel deeply at home.
I have been depressed in my life. I know what it feels like. I am very aware. I know when I am and when I'm not, and I'm not.
"We probably never met a healthy person." What the fuck does that mean? I want you guys all to send me your addresses so I can come over and kick you in the ass.
There is a second nature of hope which immediately springs to mind: that hope - and it can be just as much - can never be fulfilled. I am not of the opinion that hope is our life blood: it is the balance of hope to contentment. The better the balance, the more stable the mind. Too much hope can be toxic, and may turn to depression.
Likewise with regards to contentment. More than enough contentment tends to lead to complacency; complacency to apathy; and apathy to depression. More than a healthy amount of hope is the cause of being catastrophically let down.
To be clear, pain is not good. But this not-good of pain is potentially (in some lives) balanced out by the indeed-good of pleasure.
I suppose I am trying to Out-Herod Herod, but really I'm using a different dominant principle. I theorize that a "hero myth" or dialectically reprogrammable "virtue image" or "prime directive" is always already in play. In the light of this theory, I can understand the motive of the purveyor of dark truth.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Just to be clear, I don't see myself as a Nietzschean. He was very important to me, but he often lost his transcendence of the world. He became another moralist, another truth-bringer. I'm more of an ironist, as described in Hegel's aesthetics. I also generally like Hegel on the evolution of personalities. So I understand your view to be important, fascinating, but only a partial truth. In my view, it functions for you like a fixed idea. You experience and present it as an objective truth.
This need for it to be objective (a sort of "scientific" truth) is, for me, insufficiently detached, transcendent. When you say there is no alternative, that to me is just your investment. You are glued to this theory-persona because it's the most seductive tool/mask for self-elevation that you're aware of. It's an Ace of Spades. But I'm claiming that I have the Joker, if you will, in the game of War.
I very much agree that we are thrown into this world, which I also think is a brute fact. So there is no answer to that why, in my book. As for post-facto rationalization, I agree. But so is your view. It's all post-facto rationalization. "Reason" is rhetoric, a tool in the hand of the dark will. We persuade not only other but ourselves. IMO, you cling to truth more than I do. I think we make the "truth" when it comes to matters of value. To speak from the "transcendent" or "authentic" I is to speak from a consciousness of pure groundlessness. That can only be a first-person claim, not a scientistically delivered truth-for-all. This "truth-for-all" is the last idol of the still-too-pious "dark" thinker. But that cannot be a truth-for-all, but only words arranged in a row that you'll do with as you see fit in your terrible freedom.
Interesting. I view my "transcendence" in the same way. I try not to be seduced into evangelizing a fixed-idea or incarnating an alien Cause. My image of virtue is the self-thinking, self-loving "creative nothing" found in Kaspar Schmidt ('Stirner'), more or less. But Nietzsche is a great poet of this. Note that he is not presenting his own position here, but only of the best version of his competition:
[quote=Nietzsche]
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time.
...
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol.
...
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
...
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life—and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the “glad tidings.”
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith....
[/quote]
I cherry-picked the parts that I find seductive. Stirner is an awkward writer, but he essentially blends skepticism with this "wicked" Christianity described by Nietzsche above and some Fichte mediated through German Romantic poets through Hegel. In short, my fixed-idea is a resistance to every other fixed idea. I "heroically" identity with dis-identification itself. You are welcome to criticize my mask as I have yours. It'll keep our talons sharp for the endless war on this side of the grave.
Will-to-power, right? Yes, but "power" is ambiguous. Will-to-glory, will-to-beauty, will-to-the-sublime,.....will-to-virtue.
For me this image of virtue is at the center of every life-philosophy. It is, moreover, dialectically or rhetorically established and destabilized. Non-verbal experience also plays its part. Pain and pleasure can be louder than any abstraction. But one might speculate that the essence of philosophy is exactly this conversation about the true name of virtue. And it is possible to recognize "objectivity" as an optional investment. "Ethical socialism" (Spengler) is not a necessity. Hegel criticizes this post-objective position as The Irony in his lectures on aesthetics. But the ironist swallows Hegel more easily than Hegel can stamp out the Irony. Infinite jest laughs with the gods.
Yes, I agree with this.
Nah, I disagree. It's not just hope that keeps people going, it's a disbelief in reality. I think a lot of people know damn well that life is a sham and hope is a delusion but they aren't able to correlate all of this together and digest it. (Exhibit A: myself. Exhibit B: yourself?). It's a pill that's impossible to swallow, but until you have it's just a possibility.
I think people get along mostly from habit and not thinking about things too much. We live in such a way that consciousness is hardly necessary. Really, consciousness is the problem so it's not at all surprising that people try to minimize how much they have to deal with it by living habitually, ingesting intoxicants and sleeping in.
But insofar as you admit the possibility of salvation, then you admit the possibility of being extricated from the "human condition of instrumentality." That the instrumentality of which you and Schopenhauer and others speak forms part of the human condition is indisputable, but salvation's possibility means that this condition need not be permanent.
Schopenhauer clearly said that salvation can be found in the object of art and aesthetics. Where the will is not manifest and where the self-becomes one with the piece or work of art. Why does that so often fly out the window when discussing Schopenhauer baffles me, and speaks of the bias of the reader at heart.
On the other hand, the writing has been wonderful. I am envious of how erudite you all are.
Our own "self-indulgent despair" is the symptom of our society and our times. What you do not see is that a man cannot be the shining light of a dark age that alone dispels the darkness - a man is rather part of the historical age in which he lives. Without a change in the historical tide, an individual cannot do anything. Being born in a wicked and corrupt age, we share, we inherit the despair. It is wrong to say it is "our" despair, and not also yours. The whole Western world is on the verge of collapse.
Unlike some other people in this thread, I don't think that sickness and despair are universal conditions of mankind - no, they definitely are not. But they are our condition today, as a society. So I don't claim to speak for the whole of humanity, only for the West.
Quoting T Clark
It means that we are all sick, as a society, here in the West. The wisdom of a Lao Tzu seems far away from us, we can only stare at it from afar as a paralyzed man can stare at a piece of food while hungry, not being able to reach it. We hear and do not understand, we see and we don't perceive.
Oh how much we differ here. To me it's almost the very point of "religion" to provide transcendence, and I put that word in quotes because transcendence wouldn't be much if it left one dominated by the magic of mere words.
"The world is fallen" or "the world is evil" strikes me as a decision, a strategy. For me it's a place of danger and opportunity. It's a place where there are other people. For me the best in these other people is all I could ask for from the "divine." Whitman captures it with his talk of the "look in the eye."
When I hear the world as it actually exists cursed, it's hard not to think that this judgment comes from a lack of love, desire, curiosity. I don't believe in an afterlife, so (for me) this trouble-ridden is just how the divine is enframed, engendered. On the other hand, the primary Christian image is of a crucified God-in-the-flesh. For me that cross symbolizes the filth, hazard, the "lower" from which the "higher" has always emerged --"nothing else ever." The "divine" is nailed shamefully like a criminal to what is "wrong" with this world. I don't personally think we can have either separately. That's what the cross symbolizes for me: the terrible incarnation and attendant death of the "divine." I put these quotes around everything as a token of faith in this incarnation, a faith that is also a lack of faith in the distant-divine, an atheism.
[quote=Whitman]
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
...
I know perfectly well my own egotism,
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.
Not words of routine this song of mine,
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
This printed and bound book—but the printer and the printing-office boy?
The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets—but the pluck of the captain and engineers?
In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way?
The saints and sages in history—but you yourself?
Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain,
And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?
...
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
[/quote]
Yes, the point of religion it may be to provide transcendence and a link with the divine, but a dark age in the history of mankind is precisely an age where we have ears but hear not, and have eyes, but see not. Religion cannot do much when spirit and energy disappear.
But presumably you see, yes? I can't wait for the "we," or depend on the "we." What I largely mean by transcendence is getting beyond a political notion of spirituality. Along the same lines, transcendence also means de-scientizing the spiritual. It's not (for me, ideally) metaphysics. It's not about objective truths as the basis for objective morality. I'd say that it's this kind of thing that transcendence abandons or transcends. This politicized/scientized religion is itself the (disavowed) will-to-power you find or found in my view. Because it's a direct claim on the mind and behavior of others, albeit in the name of a distant but absolute entity.
To bring it back to the thread, Schop1 was presenting an "objective" truth in OP. He could have shared a thesis or a perspective with a sense of distance from it. But (as I see it) it's one of those personality-anchoring thoughts that only matters to the degree that it's understood as an objective truth. It's an essence over others, an avatar of moral-intellectual superiority. It's intellectual because it's a profound if gloomy metaphysical theory. It's moral because it implies the bravery and/or love of truth necessary to bear the death of the ubiquitous and comforting illusion.
To be fair, he can "psycho-analyze" my position in the same way. That touches on the "limits of persuasion" in the Kojeve thread. Sophisticated reasoners can creatively enclose and neutralize criticism. Where is the neutral third party to adjudicate? The third party has his or her own "anchoring" ideas. As I see it, "pure" rationality looks more and more implausible the more one actually just listens and reads the creative collision of personalities. Hence "sophistry," including the sophistry that denies that it is sophistry (philosophy). [Yeah, this too is sophistry, but Aristophanes was right about Socrates. He's on the team.]
I think we are saying the same thing. Hope becomes the idea that activities will dull the pessimistic aesthetic image to a narrow focus. You bring up a good idea about habit. We do things habitually, but the habits need that underlying hope as well because habits done without hope become despair really quickly. The intoxicants are just one manifestation of the hope that gets someone through the day perhaps. They know after their habits of getting on with the day, they have something to look forward to. A focus, something that also dulls the brain, and helps narrow the focus. Thus the hope itself dulls the aesthetic image and in the case of intoxicants, the actual thing hoped for when obtained, dulls the aesthetic image. It is a self-strengthening cycle to prevent the instrumentality of being felt for too long.
@t0m @Bitter Crank @T Clark @celebritydiscodave
When I say hope here, it is practically inescapable. It is the expectation of a completion in a future state. It is not necessarily always on the forefront of your mind, but it becomes the carrot underlying the current activities. If you have goal-directed behavior, hope is there. Thus, any attempt by so-called "Eastern" attempts to be in the "present" do not minimize hope. There is the "hope" of being in the present, inherent in the very attempt to do so! Of course, we can use some verbal-gymnastics to try to get out of this "pin" of being in the "hope-cycle", but it would just be rhetorical word-play. Hope is still there. "Hope that the concept of "being in the present" will be understood by that nasty, misguided pessimist on that internet forum!" Hope is that feeling in the back of your mind for why you want to do something later in that day. Hope is that feeling that some large task you worked on is getting completed more and more each day.
Now let's change gears a bit. Let's say you are the Schopenhaurean pessimist. You get out of bed (or hut, dirt floor, or wherever you are laying at the time you awake or attempt to sleep for the insomniac). You know that you are doing this because you would either be bored in bed all day, it would make you uncomfortable, or you feel you "need" to out of the encultured belief that there is something that needs to be "done" to survive (like work or not getting fired from it, or the habit of just going to a workplace). All of this is done in full awareness. You are even aware of your own nascent hopes springing forth. The hope of something happening at work, the hope of getting home from work, the hope of being with friends, the hope of making that really intricate theory. The hope of working on that project.
But the pessimist is fully aware that the hope-cycle is wrapped up in the boredom, discomfort, (enculturated/socially learned) survival and understands how It gets everyone through the day and unto the next to be repeated. However, the pessimist holds the aesthetic understanding as well. All is instrumental. It is being to be to be. It is surviving to survive to survive. It is entertaining to entertain to entertain. It is the never-ending goal-seeking that hope lubricates and gives us motivation for getting (even the depressed). The pessimist knows that the narrow goals are simply part of the instrumental nature of existence. Always becoming, never being. Our restless natures, need to stave off entropy by enculturated survival activities and keep our restless minds entertained.
There is always something lacking. But this aesthetic image, does not become overwhelming as long as the focus of goals dulls the mind into thinking that the goals themselves are something to hope for. Hope turns one away from the stark aesthetic picture of pessimism and onto a NEW task to be done. Maybe this or that, and then other, then the thing after that!! The pessimist always keeps in the back of his mind, the hope-cycle is just the carrot. The pessimist aesthetic image- that of the instrumental nature of being- the cycle of filling a cup to be emptied and filled and emptied is the nature of the human condition. It is the self-reflecting animal not losing site of the transcendental picture.
Lao Tsu WROTE something. He hoped to get his thoughts out poetically. If he didn't write it he TOLD someone.. he had a goal- hope of his words meaning something to someone. If he didn't you would not be quoting from him. It is inescapable.
I'm not sure that anyone denies the basic structure of hope, desire, or purpose. I'm trying to figure out why you find the hope-cycle so disagreeable. I mentioned the fantasy of becoming a godlike statue, of unlife-undeath as opposed to life-death. Is it about freezing time? What is this goal of having no goals? What goal is frustrated by the perception of the hope-cycle? We could also talk about the hunger cycle, the recurring need for sleep. Life is rhythmic. Is it a horror in the face of the maternal? (Paglia)
I wish you had omitted me from the general censure. I acknowledge the darkness, while denying that it is the "truth" about life. It's one face or mode among others.
Actually, if one believes the traditional account (Laozi may not have existed), then he was forced to write down his philosophy, otherwise the gatekeeper wouldn't have let him leave the city and create his hermitage in Western China.
I've been trying out this outlook on life over the past few months, and it seems to be conducive to continuing peace of mind. At my psych appointment this week, I told the doc that lately I seem to lack the urge to improve myself - a drive I have felt very strongly my whole life, to the point of feeling guilty when I didn't feel motivated to strive. Despite lacking this type of motivation, I feel pretty content with life right now. It feels good to take the pressure off, to cast away the need to be great and special. After all, there can only be so many Donald Trumps and Justin Biebers... the rest of us need to be content with being more on the average side of things.
And if you are forced to write your philosophy, would you write the truth, or a lie? >:)
Quoting t0m
I also deny it is the truth about life. But it IS the truth about the modern Western world.
Quoting t0m
No, you cannot see independently from your society. If you are born among the blind, you too are blind - and even if you're not blind, you can never see very clearly, because their affection is yours too.
Quoting t0m
Yeah, you can't - or better said you don't want to. But we may not have a choice.
Quoting t0m
That's all about social interaction and zero about truth. Truth doesn't need anyone to affirm it to be true - it is indifferent to whether it is acknowledged or not.
Nice little story. I guess he was truly the only person who lacked hope :-} and was an enlightened being that had no need for such humanly things !
Perhaps, but those aren't the ones that motivate.
The point you're refusing to acknowledge is that what you put your finger on isn't a universal way of experiencing reality, or even the objective way. It's the diseased way of the modern world.
I presume the only hope you condone is one with a capital "H", right? In other words, the hope of salvation, or the hope of following the Good as it relates to god's telos as set down in post Nicene Christian interpretations of this Idea?
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Quoting schopenhauer1
Cioran notes how in order for us to voluntarily do action we have to believe we are important and the things we do are meaningful and have worth. Really, it's all desire, and hope is the desire for a desire to be fulfilled.
How many sixteen year olds have you seen hanging out with seventy somethings this week, beyond family you`ll likely never come across it once in a lifetime, and even should you, to slow ageing one would have to be accepted into the flock of young people without prejudice, so as just another young person. We are programmed with all kinds of fantastical reasons as to why it is that we`d have nothing in common, and that it would even be wrong. We are easily programmed, we just accept them, and once accepted it forms a part of personal reality. Secretly though, for we are induced to fear the conversation, for some perhaps even subliminally, we want our youth back, we want to be let back in. Because this never actually happens we never avoid ageing.
The brain controls the endocrine system, the immune system, we are hard wired, so what do you suppose happens when we are made to feel different, older, than those we would most wish to identify ourselves with? We age, or at least we very likely age significantly faster than we otherwise might. I`m acquiring physical world records through my mid sixties, but I know that i`m nineteen years old. Perhaps it is possible to side track the social prejudice.
I felt bad about two of my comments on this thread - the one about Eeyore and the one Agustino quoted about self-indulgent despair. I made those before I realized how serious the thread was becoming.
I don't consider what I said in the post you quoted as censure. I was trying to acknowledge the pain and make up a bit for my flipness in earlier comments. I think you're right, I did paint everyone with a broad brush. I regret that.
As I said in a recent post responding to t0m, I regret the phrase "self-indulgent despair." I disagree with your characterization of the dire condition of civilization today. I have had discussions with some Christians who believe this is the beginning of a great decline because Christianity is no longer at the center of our cultural vision. Is that why you feel the way you do, or are there other reasons?
Your statement shows a lack emotional and intellectual imagination. You don't seem to be able to fathom that others experience the world and their lives differently than you do. The first two Noble Truths of Buddhism:
So, billions of people have been wrong for thousands of years.
Your vision is personal and idiosyncratic yet you proclaim it as the objective truth for all people. I'm trying to think of the right word to describe what that is. Arrogant, .... lazy,....self-indulgent, ....Those don't seem strong enough to me.
Someone does deny it. Actually, I recognize it as a phenomenon that happens and that people participate in, but it is not inevitable or desirable.
It will be easier to follow your comments if you quote from the comment you are responding to. Select the text and a little box with the word "quote" in it will pop up. Click on that and the text and a link will show up in the response you are working on.
:s
Quoting schopenhauer1
I said hope should be placed in what is eternal, not what is temporary and fleeting.
But surely we are creatures of desire and hope, attaining goals and then always setting new goals? I do understand that a certain spiritual serenity or stasis is possible in terms of the big picture. For instance, I feel that I have completed a certain dialectical journey. I haven't felt the need for a serious modification of my world-view or life-philosophy in years.
No, this isn't just about Christianity here. It's rather about the fact that no spiritual or religious tradition has currency anymore - Western man can no longer relate with the divine and with the transcendent - through no spiritual tradition for that matter. Man has been left to his own devices, and in-so-far as that is true, "God is dead", practically speaking. The West is dying spiritually. Paradoxically, it is the revelation of Christianity that has brought about this spiritual death, so far from not being at the centre, Christianity is now at the centre more than ever before in history. Christianity does not foreshadow peace and prosperity on Earth - but the Apocalypse. Whether this is "the end" or a partial end that will open upon a new beginning, that remains to be seen.
I'm glad your with us.
Indeed. In some moments we enjoy ourselves as important and worthy. In other moments we may suspect otherwise. But then creatively adjust our perspective. To say that the breakdown is the truth of the process is only have adjusted one's myth or software so that the recognition of futility is its cancellation. Public speech in inherently affirmative and "self-important."
I certainly am not suggesting a change in your world-view. I'm not saying living a life without hope is what you need. You seem like a pretty cool guy. My only point is that it is possible to live without hope. I see it as a good thing, even if I haven't been able to get it straight. Of course S1 will say I live a life of hope hoping to live without hope. There's some truth in that, but that's the irony of all the eastern religions - trying not to try, speaking about the unspeakable.
I can relate to what you're saying. There's a sense of humor or humility that's to be embraced. There is so much genius and beauty and achievement out there that just about any single person can only hope to light up their little piece of the world. And we can do that by cherishing the virtue that exists very locally for us.
In fact, I'm especially pointing at the "world-historical" itch in so much religion. Lots of us don't just want to fix ourselves. Indeed, we think we can fix ourselves only by fixing the world. We inherit an unexamined notion of spirituality that is scientific, political, world-historical. To be spiritual in this objective mode is to embrace and provide correct universal truths that bear on what not only we but others ought to do. World history is then framed as the rise and fall of the prevalence of these correct propositions about an objective God. Dreams of the world ending in flood and fire appear, to cleanse it of all the erroneous subjectivity.
We tend to understand religion in terms of authority and control, in other words. But this could be precisely the problem, our insistence that the world and others must be mended, that they are guilty or fallen in the first place. That it's not enough for us to follow our own light as our own and trust the world in its imperfection to worry about itself.
In that spirit, take everything I said above as mere version of my own "light." I try to express it clearly, but I don't feel the need to impose. I present it as an option, not knowing the "truth" of the other, but only guessing at it.
(Y)
I think we are mostly on the same page, that it's a matter of language. I recognize that you are also a "cool" guy, and I really like this word "cool." The "hot" personality is unstable, eager to prove itself --precisely because it doesn't believe. It doesn't trust in its bones. What I love about Nietzsche's vision of Christ is that it points behind language. There is a "sense" of rightness or goodness or completeness that can't be rationalized or justified, or only imperfectly. That's part of what I mean by "groundlessness." The "ground" or foundation of "wisdom" is receding or invisible. Of course I'm just poeticizing my own experience, partly to see if someone else says "that's how it is for me, too." It's a pleasure, of course, to share a sense of transcendence.
[quote=Nietzsche on Christ in The Antichrist]
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time.
It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
[/quote]
Well, if you want to look at "cool" as a philosophical term, that's ok, but I was using it more colloquially. You seem like you have your head together. You're worth paying attention to.
I feel the same about you. I realized you were using it colloquially, but I have great respect for the depths of these ordinary words. They are the tried and true "metaphysics" of life as we live it non-theoretically.
I don't think so. I know lots of mostly happy, mostly fulfilled people. I also know (but don't see much) others who are crashing and burning. Some make it. Others don't.
Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night.
Quoting Agustino
Progress is already a refutation of this. Creativity and going-against-the-grain is a naked fact. How could a Jesus or a Socrates emerge otherwise? That's what genius is, having eyes where others are blind. And would you not be sawing off the branch you perch on here? How can you yourself transcend the wickedness of our times to proclaim this wickedness, if we are utterly determined by others? We have books. We aren't trapped in the public shallowness and inauthenticity. We have a desire to be free and whole that leads us away from this shallowness.
I don't want to and I don't need to. As I see it this waiting itself is the wrong move. This immersion and commitment to the We is a disavowed lust for power. We are bound by our desire to bind and liberated ourselves by the liberation of others. This doesn't mean that we don't need laws. It's not a political point. It's a "spiritual" point. But I don't want to project it as a law. I'm just sharing or confessing what works for me, what seems beautiful and liberating to me. It may or may not work with the freedom that I do not deny you.
Agreed. Hope is the motivator behind the goal. Sure, there are some tedious goals that probably have minimal hope involved. Perhaps we can zone out all future projections and stay right in the present, but eventually the hope is going to come back and make us swing from goal to goal like jungle gym bars or a series of vines. The hopes may not even be large. As you said, intoxicants, perhaps tinkering with some toy or project. Still, it is the hope of the goals to come, of getting to another stage. It is the mirage.
This is truth as an alien object. This truth is an asteroid in the dark of pre-human time. What can "faith" mean if religion is an obsession with this person-independent object? How does this not reduce religion to metaphysical arrogance? He who sees the Thing in its Truth gets to call the shots, right? Because this non-human object is the ground of authority, right? The Law is brought down from the mountain by "Moses" the Metaphysician/Theologian of the Objective Divine. He who questions the objectivity of this object is a blasphemer, a revolutionary. For him the hemlock or the cross?
Thanks very much! I'm flattered & glad to be here.
This strikes me as totally anhedonic. In my experience people only turn to hope when they suffer. Hope arises from suffering, a sense of 'there's a reason to endure this negative experience', 'I'm enduring this negative experience because of x' is produced. But, you naturally lose that hope when you are presently enjoying yourself. There's no need to imagine a better future when the present is good.
[quote=] We entertain, to entertain, to kill time, and not be bored.[/quote]
I think what's missing here is that things entertain us *because* they are pleasurable. And not say, as just some means to escape suffering. Why am I listening to music right now? As some sort of contemplative loss of self in order to escape the dreariness of my existence? Or because it genuinely sounds good? It seems self-evident to me right now that it is the latter. Although in the past when I could barely feel pleasure I would have said the former.
[/quote]
I think hope is inherent in our cultural bias towards the future, towards the open possibilities that lie ahead. But our desires, what we hope for are not our desires. The house, the wife, the kids, the job... is the dream of a society, a collective dream, which many take as their own, which even when it is satisfied, can't satisfy. The things we hope for are not ours, and because of this we are not satisfied even when we achieve what we have hoped for. So yes it is like an opium dream, good as long as it lasts. but always depressing, always on a run, and we don't even have to put a spike in our veins, but many do.
Well put (Y) . Instrumentality is the always restless need for something that is not in the present.
But then it is over and time moves forward. What is at the end of this? What brings you to this forum? Shouldn't you be blissed out on the highest high?
But you only ask these types of questions because you are not enjoying yourself. "What is the point?" "What is the end?" These questions only arise because of the larger issue at play here - your anhedonia. Philosophical pessimism is a consequence of depression/anhedonia, and not the other way around. People don't get depressed because the world is bad, the world is seen as bad because people are depressed.
The most important issue is not whether the world is good or bad (and what follows from that - whether one should suicide, whether one should have children, etc), but rather whether one is enjoying their existence or not.
I agree, though maybe a dialectic is involved. I think the news makes some people "sick." It's an endless story about disaster, crime, suffering. Part of us likes it, so many of us tune in. But this swamps us with information we can find little use for.
We are thereby called away from our projects, from the differences we can make in our actual "little" mostly non-newsworthy lives.
You're right. The faculty of reflection is highly developed in us. This leads to a conflict, between us and reality. We can project meaning, vague as it may be, onto this reality. Unfortunately, our meaning, whatever that means, doesn't seem to have a real image, something it can map on to. I think that's the gist of what you want to say.
Madness! A distinguishing feature of madness is losing touch with reality. A madman hallucinates and suffers from delusions - the point being that the insane have expectations and thoughts that don't match with reality. How then are your views, which are unrealistic, different from that of a madman?
Truth is of course person-independent, what's wrong with that? Man is not the measure of all things, that would be ridiculously anthropocentric, not to mention based on pure self-aggrandisement and selfishness. As harsh as it is, man is in this sense not the centre of the Universe.
Quoting t0m
No, it wouldn't follow that he who understands or knows the Truth thereby gets to call the shots. Calling the shots is a practical and political affair, which has little correspondence with what is True, but rather with persuasion and influence. Truth cannot compel.
Quoting t0m
Paradoxically, it was Jesus and Socrates who believed in absolute truth, and those who killed them who didn't.
This sounds kind of like something you went through and are projecting it here. But, even if that is not the case, my answer is that instrumentality as an aeshthetic concept is there. Respond to it how you will. Sometimes the hope-cycle means you can avoid this understanding. Some people get glimpses of it when they are depressed, bored/restless, etc. To have a full blown understanding of the nature of this, and live with it, is hard, but it's not like thus you have to mope around. Even the pessimist swings from hope vine to hope vine. It just just they are more clearly articulating the big aesthetic picture.
This may be the case for some, but in terms of philosophical pessimism, this gets the cart before the horse. If the world is seen as bad because people are depressed, we have to ask why people are depressed. Sometimes they have philosophical reasons that entail a depressive outlook, and pumping them with SSRIs and attempting to negotiate their return to the capitalistic death train doesn't address these reasons. It just ignores them.
Disagree with the opinion, love the phrase.
There is a definite dichotomy here. It usually falls somewhere like this:
Instrumentality vs. Net Positive Experiences or Subjective/objective Goods
Instrumentality vs. Some sort of Eastern Zen-like Way of Being
Instrumentality vs. Progress
I agree that some truth is best described a 'person-independent.' The public world of physical objects is exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind. But philosophical and religious thinking tends to interpret this world of objects. Is there a person-independent truth about justice? Or about truth itself? Is there a person-independent truth about virtue? Do justice, truth, and virtue exist in a lifeless universe?
How do you know that man is not the measure of all things? Do you not 'measure' our situation yourself here? For me "anthropocentrism" looks inescapable. It's we humans who make it a virtue or a vice, who use it as a token in our dialogues.
I agree with Blake and Feuerbach that our conceptions of virtue and the transcendent must be founded on an image of the ideal human. A lovable, loving God only makes sense as a disembodied human, the "Human Form Divine." Or can we sincerely worship a being that makes no sense to us? Isn't this the idea in God being made visible by taking human form?
Along those lines, I suggest that man is still the center of the Universe. Of course this isn't true in the physical model, but that model is one more tool for human purposes. And even your appeal to it manifests, in my view, human centrality. You use it defend a spiritual/metaphysical view that you are invested in. And I respond to defend my own spiritual/metaphysical position. It's a token in a dialogue about virtue.
I think you and I have had this conversation before. As envisioned by Lao Tzu et. al., It is we humans who bring the universe into being out of non-being. In my view, that makes the universe half human.
I agree. Even the "non-human" is a human thought that exists for human purposes.
Yes, in the sense that the nature of Justice does not depend on what X or Y think about it (only sophists would say otherwise). That's exactly what Plato, Jesus, Socrates, etc. argued for and proved. But obviously, there can be no sense of justice in a lifeless universe (if such a thing as a lifeless universe can even be conceived :s ) - but that's simply because there would be no people for justice to apply to.
Quoting t0m
So if man does the measuring, how does it follow that man would be the measure of all things? It's entirely unrelated. I can do the measurement with reference to an external standard - in that case, I wouldn't be the measure of all things, even though I am the measurer.
Quoting t0m
No, we don't, I'd say we find that some things are virtues and others vices. Even if everyone considers X to be a vice, for example, they could be wrong. This fact alone shows us that what people think doesn't determine what is a virtue or a vice, for if it did, then it would be inconceivable that they are wrong.
Quoting t0m
So this image of the ideal human is just given? Or how is it established?
Quoting t0m
There's a big gap from God being limited to the human form, and God making no sense to us. It's not a black and white issue.
Quoting t0m
I think that's an absolutely wrong understanding of the situation. After Kant there were two continuations of the Kantian project. Schopenhauer and Hegel. I think that Hegel placed man back at the center of the Universe, while Schopenhauer placed the Will there, which is a meta-human principle.
Good one.
If someone said to you "my leg is broken! Help!" would you then say, "We all have broken legs for one reason or another - some are just less aware of their broken legs."
Quoting Agustino
Where are they? :-| (you mean they don't post on this forum?)
Quoting Agustino
Nah, I've met people who seem to have a good amount of mental health. But they're the sort who don't engage with the depth of the human condition. So, yes, those that "are not here".
All that said, how is all of that a response to my statement that I suffer from crippling depression? Given that that was the initial quote from me you quoted.
Quoting Agustino
That metaphor is unconvincing; you'd need to try something else.
I was literally addressing an apparent typo in your statement that I quoted which was confusing, but I'll respond to your post since it's interesting. Btw, if you want to respond to the other (more interesting) things I posted, feel free.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What is metaphysical rest?
How does saying "the challenges of life make one better" equate to a coping mechanism? What is a coping mechanism?
Why do people need to be born to face challenges? They aren't. People are born. Challenges crop up. There's no epistemology as of yet, given those two circumstances.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why champion nihilism and then say this?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Thanks for your (non-nihilistic) concern; I'm able to discuss these things; I just post infrequently because of lack of interest, as well as some sort of ADD or something. As well as crippling depression.
:D
Quoting schopenhauer1
So what's the point for you? The telos?
Asia.
Quoting Noble Dust
Most of those are weak mentally too. They just never face up to the issues in question. Not fighting and running away isn't the same as being strong.
Quoting Noble Dust
Why?
Quoting Noble Dust
Except that broken legs are a physical condition, and depression is mental (some is physical too, but not in all cases).
*Checks Asia for healthy people*
Quoting Agustino
Basically what I said in the part of that paragraph of mine that you didn't quote.
Quoting Agustino
Because it's unrealistic and phantastical.
Quoting Agustino
Mental illness is of the brain.
Death. Non-existence.
Quoting Noble Dust
A coping mechanism is a way that humans deal with negative emotions, negative experiences, negative situations. How does one turn the frown upside down? Try to make what is negative a positive. Thus, instead of simply saying negative is negative, people try to "spin" it as a positive. What do I mean by spin? Have you ever heard of a "spin doctor" in politics? Here is a definition: a person (such as a political aide) responsible for ensuring that others interpret an event from a particular point of view.
Quoting Noble Dust
No No. This is from the parent's point of view. If parents know life has challenges (assuming most do), then an odd outcome of them having children is knowingly setting someone up to face challenges.
Quoting Noble Dust
Post-facto: After the fact reasoning- more emphasis on people "spinning" it to look a certain way, to themselves or others.. maybe we can talk our way out of it, like so many motivational calendars.
Quoting Noble Dust
I don't know. Maybe I'm not championing nihilism (or whatever interpretation of that loaded word you are using)? Suicide is not an option because most people have a strong impulse to live despite pain or negative view of life. It is instinctual to not want to harm your body and to be afraid of the unknown (death), even if intellectually as an exercise we can view death from "afar" as simply like what it was like before we were born (or non-existence, or dreamless sleep, etc. etc.).
Quoting Noble Dust
I'll have to explain that later. Too much gathering of my thoughts for that right now.
Yes, but it's not always something physically wrong with the brain. And even if there is, the brain has neuroplasticity, it can physically change itself with mental exertion in some circumstances.
But yes, some people do seem to just have chemical imbalances.
Quoting Noble Dust
It's not unrealistic at all. Snapping out of depression is like hitting a switch. I know, because I've experienced it. The same thing looks different after.
So you mean to say:
Quoting schopenhauer1 death.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I know. I intuited that you meant something negative by saying "coping mechanism". But that's not always the case; sometimes experience presents us with unimaginable shock; PTSD, for instance, or sexual trauma as a minor. In these instances where the offense is incalculable, a coping mechanism isn't a balm to unwilling eyes; it's a balm to an uncomprehending mind. The balm, here, is categorically good.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Since when??
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm using it via my interpretation of what you're saying specifically in this thread.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm eagerly waiting!
I agree, but I wanted to highlight that depression is not always traceable to one specific cause. My depression, after long, detailed analysis done by yours truly, does not avail itself to one simple cause. I was trying to highlight that point with my comments. That probably wasn't clear. That's a trait of depression, it seems; we try to highlight our own experience at the expense of the experience of others. See my harsh comment bellow...
Quoting Agustino
I've never experienced that, so by your own logic, you're wrong.
Okay, I don't care if I'm wrong. So be it.
Quoting Noble Dust
I wasn't trying to prove you wrong, I was trying to highlight the subjectivity of depression.
What's the point of posting the Shkreli video? Especially since he says he doesn't have major depression?
I recently listened to it, and I found it interesting. He's in many ways right that having someone who unconditionally believes in you is really good - if you don't have that someone, then you must believe in yourself, unconditionally.
It took that guy to make you realize that? (seriously). :s
Quoting Agustino
Will this be successful?
Yeah, I never really thought about it, but it's true when I do think about it based on my experience.
Quoting Noble Dust
In my experience, it works.
I didn't mean to be condescending there, but that theme of lacking someone who believes in you has been a major theme in my life, so I made the assumption it was obvious. Learning about that constantly...
Quoting Agustino
In what ways?
I never really had someone who believes in me - that's how I ended up believing in myself in the first place. No one else would, and I needed it. It does help if you have a self-belief, like Schopenhauer did, in your own genius - that can pull you through many things.
Quoting Noble Dust
In that it keeps you going. It keeps you hoping for a great future even when your present isn't so great.
Interesting; I had a really great percussion teacher, but other than that, not much. But I did develop a belief in my own musical genius. But it hasn't gotten me far. I don't much believe in that line of reasoning. But I do still believe in my own genius; I just don't much care if others think of me as such.
Quoting Agustino
This doesn't do much for me; it must just be a personality thing. We're not really discussing philosophy proper at this point.
Yeah of course. The point of self-belief is that it doesn't matter what others think.
Quoting Noble Dust
Not yet at least. It is necessary but not also sufficient. To get far you have to find a way that works. How can your music reach a wide enough audience? Who would recognise your music as great? How can you make people love it? A lot of this is marketing, and not really making music. Without the right marketing, even the greatest music will remain unknown.
I'm all too familiar with all of that. (Y) Perhaps a topic for another thread.
Nothing wrong with describing an interesting picture. It also had a reference to another thread I wrote: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1800/ever-vigilant-existence/p1
Quoting Noble Dust
I agree, for traumatic incidents, that is a positive. But let's not conflate what is an obvious difference. One is used in an everyday sense of estimating life itself, birth, and existential questions in general, the other is dealing with severe psychological suffering. So it would be very different parts of the spectrum, or perhaps just different ways of using that term.
Quoting Noble Dust
Either the parent knows its offspring will face challenges, is willfully ignorant, or ignores the fact and underestimates the challenges (and the many unknowns as to quantity and quality). Any of those are not great.
Quoting Noble Dust
I don't usually go by the term nihilism, so it is not by my thread. I associate my positions more with Philosophical Pessimism (e.g. Schopenhauer, Zapffe, Cioran, etc. etc.).
Quoting Noble Dust
I already explained it. This was an adequate answer: It is instinctual to not want to harm your body and to be afraid of the unknown (death), even if intellectually as an exercise we can view death from "afar" as simply like what it was like before we were born (or non-existence, or dreamless sleep, etc. etc.). I can add that it may be cultural as well.
Most my thoughts are about antinatalism (Is life worth STARTING) which is a different question than suicide (Is life worth CONTINUING). Also, usually Pessimism is a consolation while still being alive- one that is more aware of the structural and contingent suffering. You can even say it is a coping strategy, but one that does not ignore what is going on, or try to diminish it, etc. but directly face it head on, and promotes free discussion that is suppressed under slogans.
This idea accords with Neoplatonism and Schopenhauer's philosophy as well.
We all do live in the same world, so it's not surprising that different times and cultures have similar insights.
From here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoplatonism/#SouNat. This section also directly bears on another discussion I recently had with @schopenhauer1 on evolution and the Platonic Ideas.
(Replying to the message quoted below.)
I don't think life is that bad. It definitely can have its bad moments, but there are good things.
Given that we're in life, because of an initial inherent inclination for it, we don't have a choice other than to complete it, in however many lifetimes that takes...(or to just make the best of this one lifetime, if you don't agree that there's reincarnation).
A life can have adversity, can have something happen to a person, can even start out adverse. But, as mentioned above, there's a requirement or need to have these lives until we no longer need them. (or to just complete this one as well as possible if you don't agree that there's reincarnation.)
If there's reincarnation, then the good things and the adversity average out over many lives (good along with bad experiences), and the inclinations or un-discharged consequences will eventually be satisfied, and the lives will be done. In the meantime, maybe we can usually realize the temporariness of the bad parts.
If there isn't reincarnation, then at least one can have quiet peaceful rest at the end of this life.
That moving goalpost situation you describe is a problem of some people, but not all people. ...if someone's attitude is to live that way. Maybe most people do. A person needn't.
That instrumental view sounds too Materialist. Of course it's true from the "physical story" objective 3rd-person scientific evolutionary point of view. In terms of natural selection, we fulfill our life-purposes so that we'll beget, support, protect and rear a next generation who will, in turn, beget a next generation...and so on.
From our own point of view, it isn't like that. It's more like what i said at the beginning of this post.
Michael Ossipoff
(Below is your message)
Quoting schopenhauer1
More than one lifetime- one of many lives seems pretty horrifying. Maybe good timing for Halloween?
Instrumentality vs. Suicide
Quoting schopenhauer1
I mean, suicide is always an option right. Over a million people do it every year. That's between 2500 and 3000 people just today.
If life is bad, and we're nothing more than rats on the wheel staring at hope in the distance, why not just end it? What's keeping you here? Like you say, even (philosophical) pessimists are trapped in the hope cycle. But those rats who lose the ability to imagine the hope in the distance hang themselves from the wheel.
Is hope really an 'opiate of the masses', when it's what keeps us in this world of suffering? Death is the ultimate pain relief, maybe lack of hope is the true opiate.
Sure, when you look at what happens to lot of people in this world.
In fact, of course we're all born to die. For every one of us, something eventually is going to happen to us that will end our life. And, not always, but often, it can be something unpleasant, to a greater or lesser degree.
That major final damage, sometimes with considerable suffering, is arguably the worst part of a life, but we all have it.
(Some people seem to look forward to that end, and long for,it, and even want to bring it about prematurely, in the mistaken belief that they'll achieve "oblivion". But it's obvious that there' s no such thing as oblivion. You never experience the time after bodily-dissolution. Only your survivors experience that time.)
I guess that's why Nisargadatta said that birth is a clamity.
So sure, the possibility of many lives could be a bit scary. But, as i said, maybe not as bad if, in the adversity, we realize that it's only temporary.
One single life seems more difficult to justify than a sequence of lives, when you look around at the lives that some people are having in this world. Which is worse, a sequence of lives in which the good and bad parts average out, or one horrific tragic short life in a country that's getting ravaged by external attack?
I'm not saying that proves reincarnation.
I suggest that reincarnation has metaphysical support. Actually it seems pretty amazing that there's something instead of Nothing, even when there's a good metaphysical explanation. And likewise it's amazing and feels inexplicable that this life started. Whatever the reason why this life started, then if, at the end of this life, that reason remains, then what does that suggest?
Michael Ossipoff
Of course that's just another (particularly extreme) instance of pursuing a false hope. ...choosing to immediately achieve the ordeal at the end of a life, in hopes of gaining......what? Nothing? For one thing, we never reach Nothing.
Michael Ossipoff
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
? Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born
But perhaps Noble Dust's point is another quote from Cioran:
“I live only because it is in my power to die whenever I want; without the idea of suicide I would have killed myself a long time ago.”
That's just a bare assurance. As far as the famous names are concerned, clearly your own interpretation is involved. Indeed, if such a thing has been proved, then why do we still not have consensus? And was Jesus one to argue like a philosopher, even as possibly only a character in the gospels?
What I do find plausible is a more or less "hardwired" fuzzy foundation of what is expressed in fact in a multitude of ways. There is rough agreement about the basics, but massive disagreement on the level of detail.
Quoting Agustino
What is the external standard of virtue? Your opinion? The opinion of thinkers that you prefer as opposed to the opinion of thinkers that you do not prefer? IMV you are ignoring the palpable fact of disagreement. You can assert and believe that your notion of virtue is "true" or "accurate" or transpersonal, but you'd just be joining a crowd of others who assert the same about their own, differing notions of virtue. I'm more interested understanding this variety itself.
Quoting Agustino
Could be wrong from whose perspective? This just seems to reframe the disagreement about what virtue is as some kind of "proof" of "objective" virtue. "Because we disagree and consider others wrong, someone must be right." I'd suggest that only our faith in a particular image allows us to understand others as wrong.
Quoting Agustino
I suggest that the basic structure is given. We are born with a "virtue-shaped hole" that is "filled" or given content (at first) by our parents and community. If this notion of virtue includes critical thinking and individualism, however, it is self-subverting. A philosopher or artist can re-conceive virtue. He or she may "seduce" or persuade others to adopt this modified image of virtue. Is it not a fact that we've all experienced that our notion of virtue evolves as we live our lives? On a larger scale entire cultures can modify a dominant image of virtue or understanding of being. Humanism can replace the sense of a duty to some alien God. More specifically the scientist can replace the theologian as the one who really knows what's going on.
For me this "image of virtue" is both persons and cultures is the fundamental issue. I posit that it functions not only conceptually but also in terms of images and feeling-tones. Not everyone is eloquent enough to be explicit about their understanding of virtue. Examine their heroes. Are they thinkers, athletes, musicians, actors, activists, saints, prophets, mothers, soldiers, ordinary hard-working guys, the proletariat, etc.? These embodied images guide individuals and cultures, as I see it. Who do I aspire to be? In creative types the anxiety of influence clearly plays a role, because creative heroes only exist as distinct personalities. (Note that the greatest scientists are creative. They bring new paradigms. )
Really? I thought that Socrates knew that he didn't know? He didn't even write down the absolute truth. What a bum! We could have used that. As far as Jesus goes, I find Nietzsche's interpretation of "I am the truth" more convincing and profound than most.
[quote=N]
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
[/quote]
I don't think you see where I'm coming from. I'm trying to point out an "invisible" assumption on your part (and on the part of many others) that religion is a form of knowledge. I'm suggesting that looking at religion as a set of propositions (or even as a set of practices) is not the only way to look at religion and perhaps not even the best way.
In terms of the "image of virtue" this gives priority to man-the-knower. The "virtuous" man is from this investment's perspective) an earnest and accurate "meta-physicist." So religion is reduced to a matter of being correct, or asserting propositions that correspond to some non-propositional reality. But that makes religion into a "science" of the divine. It thereby reduces the divine to an object for a subject. "Righteousness" is conflated with rightness. It's religion from the perspective of a "know-it-all" personality. This is "theology as theorem." This is not the incarnate, living God but only the book as God.
I'm not at all suggesting that "spirituality" should be non-conceptual. Nor am I really trying to impose some universal should. Just as I question theology-as-theorem, I also question the one-size-fits-all paradigm. To suggest that religion need not be universal truth is to suggest both that it need not be truth (knowledge) and that it need not be universal (a transpersonal and finally political imposition of disavowed individual will ).
What does it mean for God to make sense to us, though? He has to be (in that sense) "within" our human reason exactly to the degree that we understand him. What do humans value? Human virtue. What can we mean by saying that God is good if not that God has a virtuous essentially human character? He is disembodied virtue. He has more love, power, and knowledge than other humans, but this love, this power, this knowledge....are they not basic human desires? We want to love and be loved. We want to understand. And we want the power to shape reality into paradise and to protect ourselves from others.
I think people overestimate the degree to which they can understand God.
Say you rescue an animal, maybe an insect. If it knows anything about you, it only knows that you rescued it.
What can you know about God? Benevolence. Complete Benevolence.
Michael Ossipoff
But for me the problem is that this itself is an assertion about God. What do you understand about God that suggests that people in general overestimate their understanding? I like your insect analogy, but I've used something similar to support my own point. If we are insects in relation to some God, then what can that God ever be for us that won't fit into an insects mind? God-for-us (the only God we could by definition ever hope to talk about sensibly) "must" be human-like to the degree that God is intelligible at all. This is the theological version of the problem with the thing-in-itself, except that some would have us worship the symbol we use to represent our inability to know. (I don't really mind, to be clear, how others worship God or give content to the word if they respect my freedom to do the same.)
This is a dark and profound quote. Suicide is arguably important as an option. It allows us the sense of having chosen to persevere. I sometimes think of Hunter S. Thompson. A sick old man has (as I see it) every right to choose his moment. Rights are a funny concept here. But I think suicide can be beautiful and noble in some contexts. Inoperable brain cancer that threatens to destroy the personality is just about the perfect reason. But any unfixable condition that humiliates human dignity is defensible, as I see it. Cioran himself, however, is over the top. Though I have enjoyed the terrible freedom in a few of his books. That's the hard stuff, the questionable stuff. It's a product on the market. What does that say about us? I'm not against it. It just speaks to how atomized we really are. The individual has lots of rope to hang himself with.
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I don’t say that based on a better understanding. What do I understand about God?
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There’s a feeling that, behind the goodness of what is, there’s good intention.
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Benevolence.
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That’s it. I don’t know anything else about God.
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That’s well-expressed by a line in the song “5D”, by the Byrds.
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It isn’t something that can be logically-proved.
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Metaphysics is the discussion of what is. Metaphysics can be described and known. God isn’t an element of metaphysics.
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Even to speak of Creation is anthropomorphic.
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The whole matter is quite beyond our understanding, other than the benevolence.
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Entirely beyond our understanding.
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I wouldn’t expect humanlike-ness or intelligibility.
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Mice could debate whether humans gnaw hardwood or softwood.
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Michael Ossipoff
What would your expectation mean here? Why would you bother to expect something other than what you could comprehend? That expectation looks to me like an empty negation.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What is the content of this phrase? It's just negation. I'm not saying it's wrong or right, just trying to point out what's beyond our understanding doesn't exist for us. We are slapping a word with a certain emotional charge (gathered from a history of actual human-like "fatherly" content) on what is more or less the metaphysical concept of nothingness/negation. What is at all still godlike about this conceptual shell?
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You said:
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I don’t understand the question. What should an expectation mean?
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(rhetorical question—Don’t bother answering)
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You said:
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I don’t want to criticize anyone’s religion, or say that anyone’s religious beliefs aren’t valid.
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So, if you believe that you comprehend God, or all of Reality, I won’t say that you don’t.
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But yes, I wouldn’t make such a claim about myself.
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We can just agree that you’re more ambitious than I am. …and maybe a bit more doctrinaire.
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You said:
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It was an expression of skepticism regarding human ability to comprehend all of Reality, including God. I admit that I’m surprised to hear that you believe that you comprehend God, but I re-emphasize that it isn’t for me to tell you that you don’t or couldn’t.
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But, as for whether that “negation” is empty or full, I’ll defer to you on that issue :D
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You said:
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You’re repeating yourself. See above.
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You said:
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If you believe that you understand all that exists for you, then I won’t say that you don’t or couldn’t.
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I don’t know what “exists for you”. Whatever that is, it isn’t for me to say whether or not you understand it or could understand it. Those are your beliefs, and your beliefs are none of my business.
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One thing that brings your meaning into question is that “Exist” isn’t philosophically defined. Anyone can and does use that word with whatever meaning they choose.
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So I never argue about what “exists”.
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You said:
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Well, speak for yourself.
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So, for you, God is a metaphysical concept. I don’t agree with you, but, as I said, it isn’t for me to criticize your beliefs or say that they aren’t valid.
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I’ll now also admit that I have no idea what you mean when you speak of God. But yes, as you suggested above, you’re evidently referring to a conceptual belief.
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You said:
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Speaking for myself, I don’t agree with your notion of God as a concept, or an element of metaphysics. So I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s godlike about your concept.
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…especially since it’s you who imply that you believe that you understand God, and therefore presumably are qualified to judge regarding what is godlike.
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But you talk about God a lot more than I do, with much discussion of attributes. I agree that that’s consistent with your belief in God as a concept.
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There’s really no basis for a conversation with you. I can’t relate to your conceptual notion of God, or your belief that you understand God, or your belief that you understand everything that exists for you.
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In general, I avoid conversations with people who hold doctrinaire conceptual religious beliefs.
I don't debate religion.
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Michael Ossipoff
As an aside, you may want to highlight what you respond to and click the quote button that appears. That'll put the quote in a box and let the quoted person know that you've replied.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Why would ask a merely rhetorical question about a question you didn't answer? IMV, this misunderstanding or failure-to-grasp is all there in the way that question slides off for you.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
No. I'm looking at what words like 'God' or 'all of reality' could feasibly mean in the first place. We can go back to Parmenides: nonbeing is not. Some words have no real conceptual content. They are just negations in a dry conceptual sense. But they can have great emotional content. The philosopher's God gets its emotional content from the non-philosopher's anthropomorphic God. But the philosopher cleans this up by emptying the concept of everything determinant. The word still drags along a certain emotional content, however devoid of conceptual content.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Nothing is easier to comprehend that God as the negative object. Hegel made this point long ago. If the absolute is "drained" to an image of pure transcendence (=ignorance), then it just meres the idea of the transcendental subject, the bare unity of apperception. The negation is a negation of determinate content. I'm not against agnosticism. I'm just suggesting that one way of understanding it is as the worship of a question mark. Ultimately it's a heroic abstinence. "I know that I don't know." But ultimately one takes pride in a form of knowledge. So there's something slippery and questionable involved. It's not so modest as it poses?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Yes, this meaning of being is a great issue. I'm knee-deep in Heidegger at the moment, and that's his jam. What does it mean for something to be? We toss off the word 'is' all the time. We argue about beings. But we take this 'is' for granted. Yet this 'is' may be the deepest of issues.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You are missing the key fact that I'm at least as "agnostic" as you. You seemingly can't help but frame being challenged in terms of this drama of the "doctrinaire" versus the noble agnostic. Suffice it to say that you have radically misunderstood me, all too confident that you know where I'm coming from. You are of course free to scurry away secure in what I'd call your own (generalized) religious belief. From my perspective, you are being insufficiently self-conscious, refusing to see your own investments/decisions as such. It's cool if you want to end the dialogue. But it's pretty lame to make some long post and then "storm out of the room" by insisting the conversation is over. If you are done talking, then just don't reply.
When you said what I quote at the bottom of this post (especially the last part) I interpreted as you going into the personal-criticizing mode, and it seemed that the discussion had turned ugly. Now I don't think that it was intended about me, so that was just my misinterpretation. If so, then, my apologies about the hostile manners--if i was the one who introduced bad manners--and now it looks as if it's likely so.
I stay in metasphysyics discussions when they get ugly, but religion discussions shouldn't get ugly. Hence my reaction.
(I think religion and metaphysics are entirely different subjects)
Tomorrow morning I'll have a better chance to reply.
In metaphysics discussions, part of my purpose is to convince others who look at the discussion (you never convince the person who's arguing with you). In religion discussion, my purpose is never to convince anyone. My purpose in a religion discussion is only to clarify my position. It's never about disagreement or who's right, or debate.
So I'd like to better clarify my position, when I reply tomorrow morning.
A few brief preliminary comments now.
Agnostic? Well I feel the matter is completely unknowable, has nothing to do with knowledge, concepts or facts. Not the sort of thing that I could prove to someone. So, maybe Agnostic in that sense. But, as a feeling, it's a positive feeling, not a doubtful feeling.
As I said, i feel there's a good intent, benevolence, behind the goodness of what is. It's a feeling, an impression. I don't feel that anything about it is knowable, or part of the world of logic and factual issues, but neither do I doubt the feeling. So Agnostsic probably isn't the right word. But I can't argue an impression. That's why I feel that it isn't a debate subject at all.
It isn't a matter of metaphysics. It's an impression of good intent behind and above metaphysics.
When people speak of God, I assume that they're talking about what I've mentioned above. That's why I said that that's all I know about God.
More tomorrow, if I've left anything out.
Sorry if I misinterpreted you as being on the attack.
Michael Ossipoff.
Quoting t0m
(I thought that I was being accused of all that.)
Yeah, I think you misunderstood my tone and intentions. That's OK. I hope I wasn't too rude in return.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I can relate to this. I don't know if you saw Nietzsche's interpretation of Christ earlier in the thread, but it's a negative theology of feeling, one might say. It has nothing to do with "logic and factual issues." In other words, we seem to generally agree in some important way. My 'theology' is so negative that I feel absolutely no piety toward the word 'God.' All words are just concepts for the concept mill.
I don't feel evangelical about it, but I am always on the lookout for others who feel a transcendence of mere concepts as religion or mere politics as religion. For me there's something like a realization that puts one "behind" words. There are words for this realization, but these words don't tend mean anything to most philosophers. I think we really do just vary so much as individuals that there's just no reason to expect convergence or assume that there is "one right way" to be "spiritual." Some are "wired" sufficiently similarly and have had sufficiently similar experiences to bond over a paragraph. But it's rare. We mostly talk past one another. I can accept that. Still, I enjoy sharing my words and reading the words of others, even if they mostly bounce off in either case.
I’ve never read about theology, because I don’t think scientific, logical or philosophical conceptual reasoning applies everywhere, so I have no idea what sort of concepts theologians can write whole books of information about. Also, I’ve never understood what philosophers mean when they speak of God.
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It sounds like conceptual, hypothetical, logic-based philosophy. Maybe metaphysical.
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My metaphysics (Faraday, Tippler, and Tegmark, and (from what I’ve heard here) Wittgenstein too, beat me to it, in its main basis) is about hypothetical things too, based on inevitable abstract logical facts, to explain our world and life-experience.
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But I don’t feel that logic, philosophy, concept, can be taken to apply to more than the metaphysical world of “material” lives and universes.
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There are few intriguing questions, like the Hindu & Buddhist notions of incarnations in nonphysical realms. Could there logically/metaphysically be such a thing as a nonphysical possibility-world, or a nonphysical life-experience possibility-story—without physical laws? Not that I can imagine, but I don’t know.
I feel that individual experience is fundamental and primary to lives and worlds (from our relevance-point-of view), but I don't know how a nonphysical life-experience possibility-story could play out.
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But any philosophy about God in terms of knowledge, facts, logic, metaphysics, and philosophy, or philosophical elaboration of detail, or philosophical explanation—is incomprehensible to me.
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Michael Ossipoff
I don't know much about theology in general, though traditional theology does use logic to "prove" the existence of God. I did study some "negative" or apophatic theology, which is closely related to extreme forms of atheism. I don't have a sense that there is some God outside of us. I agree with Feuerbach. Religious thought is anthropomorphic, but that's a good thing! At least for Feuerbach. Man is the god of man. In the myth of the incarnation this becomes explicit. I read these myths as coded truths about human nature.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
If you can summarize this, I'd enjoy a sketch of your basic view.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I deeply agree with you here. What I'm really interested is the structure of life as we intimately know it. Heidegger's phenomenological "analytic of Dasein" is something I'm really getting into lately. I highly recommend The Concept of Time, if you ever decide to look into ol' Heidegger. It's only 100 pages and it's the first draft of his famous Being and Time. Best book I've picked up in a long time. Of course B&T itself is great, too, but I like the density and focus of the first draft.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
It's kinda funny that we misunderstood one another at first, because this is more or less what I was trying to say in my talk of "empty negation." To convert God into propositions is to kill off the "force" of the word, what the word has hinted at. For me the "divine" only makes sense as feeling, as a mode of being alive. I do think this mode is supported by the "right" kind of thinking, but "feeling is first."
I’d said:
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You said:
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Ok, thanks for clarifying that. Of course that’s Atheism. I don't criticize someone else's position--to each their own. …and you aren’t one of those preachy or evangelistic Atheists, who comprise most Atheists.
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Anyway, that answers my question, quoted above. I’ve suspected that most people talking philosophically about God are Atheists.
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I’m not evangelizing, proselytizing, preaching, promoting, or trying to convince anyone, but, just for position-clarification, I emphasize that I’m not an Atheist.
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It seems to me that the position that I described in an earlier reply qualifies me as a religious person and a Theist.
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I was raised Atheist, but later, as an adult, I began questioning and doubting Atheism, and eventually left that faith.
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I’d said:
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— Michael Ossipoff
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You asked for a sketch of my metaphysics. I’ll be glad to post a sketch, in this post, but, just to let you know in advance, my sketches can be a bit long.
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I wanted to say things that no one would disagree with. …uncontroversial statements. That was what I was trying for, when proposing this metaphysics. …a completely uncontroversial metaphysics.
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Any fact about our physical world can be said as an if-then fact. If I tell you that there’s a traffic roundabout at the intersection of 34th & Vine, that could also be said by saying that if you go to 34th & Vine, you’ll encounter a traffic roundabout.
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We’re used to declarative grammar, because it’s convenient. But I suggest that conditional grammar is at least as accurate a description of our physical world. A world of “if”, rather than “is”.
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If someone examines the physical world in close detail, they’ll encounter physical laws, about physical quantity-values.
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Physicists encounter that via their experiments. We can encounter it via our experiences—including direct perception, and the experience of hearing the physicists’ reports.
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Abstract logical facts don’t need an explanation. They’re inevitably there. Likewise, complex systems of them.
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This word is a complex system of inevitable abstract logical if-then facts about hypotheticals.
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For example:
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A set of hypothetical physical quantity-values, and a hypothetical physical law that consists of a relation among them, are parts of the “if “ premise of an if-then fact.
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…except that one of those physical quantity-values can be taken as the “then” conclusion of that if-then fact.
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A mathematical theorem is an if-then fact whose “if “ premise includes, but isn’t limited to, a set of mathematical axioms (geometric or algebraic).
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Just as abstract logical facts are inevitable, so are complex systems of them. And, among those infinitely-many complex systems of inter-referring inevitable abstract logical if-then facts about hypotheticals, there inevitably must be one whose events and relations match those of our “physical” universe.
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There’s no particular reason to believe that our universe is other than that. There’s no physical experiment result that suggests otherwise.
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Michael Faraday pointed that out in 1844.
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If this physical universe has some sort of “objective” existence, other than as a complex logical system, then that’s a superfluous, unverifiable fact, an unfalsifiable proposition.
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If, in our universe, there’s the objectively, concretely, fundamentally existing “Stuff”, that Materialism believes in, then it’s superfluous, unverifiable, and the subject of an unfalsifiable proposition.
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I don’t claim that what I hypothesize in the two above paragraphs aren’t superfluously, unverifiably, unfalsifiably true. (…though I feel that there’s no particular reason to believe that they are.)
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And no one would disagree that there are abstract facts, and the infinitely-many complex systems of them that I spoke of above.
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So then, I’d say that there’s no disagreement about the metaphysics that I’ve just described.
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There’s no reason to believe that our universe isn’t one of infinitely-many such complex systems of inter-referring inevitable abstract logical if-then facts about hypotheticals.. One of infinitely many such complex logical systems.
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Instead of one world of “is” -- infinitely many worlds of “if “.
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If someone questions the “reality” or “existence” of those complex systems of abstract logical facts, then I reply that each one such system needn’t have any reality, existence, relevance or validity outside of its own local inter-referring context.
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Each one is an isolated local system, and needn’t be real or existent in any context other than its own. …needn’t be real or existent in any larger or global context. …needn’t have some global medium in which to be real or existent.
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Are the other infinitely-many possibility-world universes real to us? Of course not. Likewise ours isn’t real to their inhabitants either.
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This is basically what Michael Faraday was quoted as saying in 1844.
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Here are some ways in which my metaphysics, my version of this Eliminative Ontic Structuralism, differs from those of Frank Tippler and Max Tegmark (his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH):
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1. Contrary to what I might have implied above, I define this logical system primarily from the individual-experience point of view, where Tippler and Tegmark define it from the objective, whole-universe, 3rd-person point of view. Tegmark is quite explicit about that, espousing a first principle called The External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) (or something like that).
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Because “Real”, “Existent” , and “Is” aren’t philosophically-defined, I suggest that there isn’t really a meaningful issue between Realism and Anti-Realism. Neither is absolutely right or wrong.
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So I refer to a complex system of inter-referring inevitable abstract logical if-then facts about hypotheticals that is an individual “life-experience possibility-story”. …of which there are infinitely-many.
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I say that, for us, it’s most meaningful to speak of us and our experience as being metaphysically-primary.
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You’re in a life because there’s a life-experience possibility-story that’s about you. ,,,about someone just like you, with your basic subconscious attributes, inclinations, feelings etc. …about you. You’re the protagonist in that story.
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It certainly empirically makes sense for us to define the metaphysical world based on our experience, because, for one thing, everything that we know about this physical world comes to us from our experience. That’s what there directly observably metaphysically is, for us. It’s reasonable, natural and right for us to speak from our own empirical point of view.
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Nisargadatta said that we didn’t make our world, but we make it relevant.
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That implies, and I agree, that Anti-Realism is valid and right for us, but doesn’t really rule-out a kind of reality for all abstract facts, including systems of them that are uninhabited universes.
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It’s a matter of relevance to us.
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One could say that we’re the reason why our world is relevant (…meaning relevant to us). That has a circular sound to it, and it sounds like living-being chauvinism--which it would be, if we took Anti-Realism as absolute fact.
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The abstract facts that make up our life-experience possibility-stories aren’t really different from the ones that make up uninhabited universes, or aren’t part of a life-experience possibility-story or a possibility-world.
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I sometimes, as a chauvinism analogy reminiscent of absolute Anti-Realism, I quote a story that says:
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“Alright”, said the Giraffe, “then let’s just say the one with the longest neck gets all the jellybeans.”
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(Kenneth Patchen, Because It Is….San Fransisco beat-poet)
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In the infinity of possibility-world universes, it’s inevitable and natural that there must be experiencing-beings, and, from their (our) point of view, we experiencers and our experience are primary, and that’s a valid empirical description. I speak of an Anti-Realism because I’m describing it from the point of view of experiencing-beings.
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MUH has been called Eliminative Ontic Structural Realism. I claim that it makes more empirical sense to speak of Eliminative Ontic Structural Anti-Realism (EOSAR).
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2. Tegmark calls MUH a “hypothesis”. I call EOSAR an inevitability, an uncontroversial metaphysics.
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3. Tegmark referred to MUH as an explanation of Reality. I don’t believe that any metaphysics, describes, is, or explains Reality.
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4. Tegmark and Tippler have said that our physical universe might be a universe created by a computer-simulation. I say that a computer simulation can’t create something that already timelessly is—a possibility-world or a life-experience possibility-story.
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A computer simulation could duplicate, portray, a possibility-world, for its viewing-audience, but it certainly can’t create what already timelessly is.
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I’ll check out The Concept of Time eventually, especially if I run into it. Sometimes the famous philosophers say things that confirm or agree with what I’m saying, as when Wittgenstein was quoted as saying that there are no things, only facts.
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And, if they say something that I disagree with (as Tippler and Tegmark have), then I want to comment on that difference too.
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Certainly, though my impression of good intent behind what is, benevolence above metaphysics, is an impression, with nothing to do with logic or argument. But it’s an impression that I don’t doubt.
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Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I'll grant that it is what most would call atheism. But I have an understanding of language that "problematizes" the atheist-theist distinction. The "divine" is "real" as a certain kind of feeling that is related to a certain kind of thinking. A "negative theology" is beyond an obsession with concepts and objectivity. I'm glad that you see that I'm not preachy. In a way, I'm trying to be the opposite of preachy. Yes, I'm sharing my ideas. But one of the ideas I'm sharing is the (possibiliy for others and reality for me ) of the transcendence of understanding religion "scientistically."
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Right. I can relate. "Nature" is an abstract system of necessity. If this now, then that later. If this here, then that there. It's a conditional causal nexus.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I can especially relate to the above. To make experience primary is to be phenomenological. I want to describe what I see "accurately," and this involves looking "around" the pre-interpretations that hide what's really just there. We inherit all kinds of metaphysical views that we swim in without noticing. Intent on proving an objective truth that justifies enforcing our will, we usually distort the object. Even the usual subject-object paradigm is arguably a distortion/abstraction. For the most part we are what we are doing. I am the typing of this sentence as I type it.
Nisargadatta reminds me of Heidegger. We don't experience beings or entities in some neutral way. They are lit up in terms of their significance for us. To exist is to care.
I agree that we also exist largely as possibility. As we actually experience it, the world is "haunted" by possibility. We don't gaze on objects. We see objects in the first place terms of what they make possible. It's only a particular scientific mode that strips these objects of the "film" of this possibility. I'm not against this mode. I just think this mode is bad metaphysics. It throws too much away, unconcerned with describing what is just there. Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Yes, you remind me of the TLP Wittgenstein. I also agree that the "divine" is not about logic and argument. But I'd make the Hegelian point that we have to get to that understanding through logic and argument. It takes logic and argument to clear away the association of the divine with logic and argument. A metaphysical understanding of the divine is a pre-interpretaion that we inherit.
I also don't doubt it. It is "there." But what this is is is slippery. I'm OK with that. "Ironism" is "behind" words, although it can only emerge dialecticallly from within words.
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Yes, that’s what Michael Faraday was referring to, long before Tegmark or Tippler. Some claim that a fact has to be about something, but of course these facts are about something—They’are about hypotheticals. Where does it say that a fact has to be about something objectively, independently physically existent.
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There’s resistance to the claim that this physical world consists of just abstract logical facts, but the un-defined-ness of “real” “existent”, and even “is”, should help to undermine that need for belief in the material world’s objective solidity, for a world of “is” instead of a world of “if “ …when there’s even something iffy about “is”.
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When I point out that no physical experiment shows that this physical world is other than a complex logical system, they’ll always answer that that means I’m proposing an unfalsifiable proposition. But the abstract logical facts, and complex systems of them, are inevitable, and could be “falsified” if someone could falsify their logical support.
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The genuine unfalsifiable proposition is the superflulous supposed fundamental objective existence of the physical world.
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One result of emphasis on the individual-experience point-of-view is that the mathematical physics doesn’t get all the emphasis (in contrast to MUH), because of course that isn’t all of our experience. …It’s our experience only when we closely examine the physical world.
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Yes, the notion of us as separate from what we do is like the false distinction in philosophy-of-mind, between body and some separate thing called “Mind”. I’ve been railing against that, and calling it Spiritualism. The animal (including humans) is unitary, and the separation into body and “Mind” is only in the mind of philosophers of mind. …as is the resulting “Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness”.
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Of course animals (including humans) are purposefully-responsive devices. …more complex than a mousetrap, thermostat or refrigetrator-lightswitch, and also differing from them by having been designed by natural-selection. …but still, in principle, purposefully-responsive devices like a mousetrap.
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In one thread here, they were discussing Schopenhauer, and how he, as early as 1818, was saying that Will is what’s fundamental (…if I correctly understood the discussion). That Will can be regarded as the translation, to the animal’s 1st-person point-of-view, of the 3rd-person notion of the “purpose” designed into a purposefully-responsive device.
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I once heard some things about Heidegger’s ideas that sounded interesting, but I couldn’t find anything by him at the public library. But I found, there, a book about his ideas (maybe by someone named Steiner). I seem to remember reading something about “concern” being central to a living-being. That sounds like “Will”, and the built-in purpose of a purposefully-responsive device. But it was long time ago.
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…and something about a being-in-a-world. I’ve been saying that, even though we and our experience (or will) are primary, I don’t think that there’s something called Consciousness that can be there before and without embodiment in a world. We the experiencer, an animal, are part of (even if the primary part of) the possibility-world that is the setting for our life-experience possibility-story.
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And, though I’m a Vedantist, I’ve been expressing disagreement with Advaita metaphysics, by saying that we’re the body, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. But maybe writers’ expression about Advaita mixes its metaphysics with hints about nonconceptual Reality, and so maybe Advaita metaphysics, taken by itself, doesn’t really contradict me.
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Of course, at the end of lives, we forget that there ever was or could be such a thing as a life, a body, time, or events. …and therefore have reached Timelessness shortly before the body’s complete shutdown.
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Yep, in terms of our purposes, and all as that if-then network. Scientificism has it all wrong metaphysically, putting all the emphasis and priority on fictitious objectively-existent things.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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Ok, that’s true, and, in general, it’s necessary to find out that our inner conceptual narrative about description, naming and evaluation gets in the way of actual experience.
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Also, I should add that one thing that contributes to gratitude for benevolence is when someone finds out about the goodness of what metaphysics says.
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I find that the metaphysics that I’ve been talking about implies an openness, looseness and lightness. That’s at least partly what I mean by the goodness of what is.
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Michael Ossipoff
Hell yeah. I'm delighted that we our views are closer than I thought at first. The 'iffiness' of 'is' is Heidegger's big theme. What do we mean by this 'is'? In some ways that's the fundamental question. But it gets obscured in our obsession with correctness. We forget to clarify what it is that makes correctness possible in the first place.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I'd add to this the the falsifiability paradigm is itself unfalsifiable. The criterion for 'real' knowledge cannot justify itself. In general dominant frameworks of interpretation are invisible in their dominance. The more intensely the use them, the less we can see the 'decision' to use them. We are fish blind to the water in which we swim, 'inheriting' this 'water' as common sense.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I like this, too. I'd go the extra step and de-presume the 'animal' metaphor. Of course biology has the 'right' to view man as a animal, but any particular metaphor 'locks down' the essence of being-there in a way that pre-decides. That man has tended lately to view himself as an animal among other animals is a contingent fact. Note that I'm not trying to say that man is instead a 'metaphysical' or 'theological' entity. That would be more pre-deciding.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
For me this is a partial truth, a pragmatic truth. The 'mechanical' paradigm is persuasive and valuable, but maybe it misses how 'being-there' opens up being in the first place or is this opening. Something more 'primordial' is being left out. I don't reject the theory of evolution or anything like that. My objections are phenomenological. I find the 'device' metaphor description of what-it-is-to-be-here incomplete.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Yes, 'care' for Heidegger looks like 'will' for Schopenhauer. For Heidegger existence is something like caring interpretation or interpreting care. For Schop., it's will and representation. But Heidegger stresses 'disclosure' and the power of language to 'open' the field of being in a way that Schopenhauer does not. Heidegger's analysis of the 'being-there' that we are was 'on the way' to the searching out the meaning of 'is.' It is we who ask not only what is but what this 'is' is. It is we who can reveal ourselves to ourselves as 'just animals' or 'eternal souls' or 'consciousness.' Heidegger is trying to get 'behind' all these pre-decisions to look at what 'in' us makes them possible.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I concur. Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I love all of this. That 'openness, looseness, and lightness' is also at the center of my thinking.
Especially at a philosophy forum, apparent differences often likely have more to do with different definitions and wordings, rather than different substantive opinions. For example, regarding the Atheist vs Theist matter, we agree about the goodness of certain metaphysics-implications. I perceive that as that as Benevolence, and reason for gratitude, and I perceive that impression as something significant in common with religious people in general, and so I say that I’m religious, and a Theist. But, people interested in philosophy of course have many diverse ways of wording things, and it often sounds like different opinions and positions when it isn’t.
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Materialist/Scientificist Atheists are different, with their-life attitude distinctly different, colored by their grim Materialist metaphysics. For a while, I was talking to one, at a different forum. There, it seemed really a matter of his getting it straight was he meant by words like “real”. He said that “real” is synonymous with “measurable”, physical. Given the complete flexibility of “real”, he can define it that way. He said that he considered himself a Materialist because of that, but said that he didn’t fit the dictionary definition of a Materialist, because, though he referred to the physical world as “reality”, and all that’s real, he didn’t claim to know whether it comprises all of reality. I pointed out to him that he was using “reality” with two different definitions, in one sentence.
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He kept saying that he didn’t claim to know if there’s anything “beyond reality” (presumably meaning “beyond the physical world”). Well, abstract objects aren’t of the physical world, so that would seem to answer his doubt. I don’t think he’d deny that there’s the number two, for example. He can call it unreal if he wants to.
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I tried to explain that he didn’t really disagree with my metaphysics, because he must know that there are abstract logical facts, and complex inter-referring systems of them, whether he calls them real or not. And I’m not claiming any more than that.
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I don’t claim that what I propose is objectively real anyway, so I’m not claiming anything that he denies.
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Of course, as a Materialist, he believes in something that I don’t believe in, but I don’t outright deny its existence. I just say that it would be superfluous, because the logical structure , with the same events, relations, and physics experimental results, is already there with or without his objectively existent material world and things to duplicate it. …as Faraday pointed out in 1844.
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So it seems to me that Materialism is just comes down to the Materialist’s misunderstanding &/or inconsistency about what he means.
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But just try to convince him of that.
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So I claim that the metaphysics that I’ve described is completely uncontroversial, and isn’t saying anything to disagree with; but different people at a philosophy forum often discuss various different aspects of philosophy.
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Yes, the un-defined-ness, and uncertain meaning, of “real” “exist”, and even “is”, amounts to a big problem for the metaphysics of Materialism and the related religion of Scientificism, which claim definite, sure, certain, objective fundamental existence and reality for their world and its things.
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(Could that, and problems like it, be a reason why academic philosophers don’t come here to express their positions in an open forum, or otherwise communicate with the public in open forums in general—preferring to discuss only with eachother and publish among themselves, in their own isolated, insulated, sheltered bailiwick/citadel?)
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And, as I mentioned, that undefinedness of “real” seems to get rid of the issue about Realism vs Anti-Realism.
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…and contributes to that openness, looseness and lightness that seems to be what metaphysics points to.
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I’d said:
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. — Michael Ossipoff
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You wrote:
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Sure, I don’t mean it like Scientificism. It’s just that, even though it makes sense to describe and define our world in terms of us and our experience, and that’s as valid as any description or point of departure, it’s also true that, in terms of the physical-story, we, as experiencing-beings, are part of the physical possibility-world that’s the setting for our life-experience possibility-stories.
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So I was just looking at the matter of “What are we, in terms of our physical world? …without meaning to imply that that’s the only way to look at it.
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Either way you look at it, isn’t the experiencer always necessarily part of his/her world, where experiencer and world are an inseparable complementary system? …at least until such time as the world, life, time, events and identity fade away at the end of lives.
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Experience, and the life-experience possibility-stories, and possibility-words are all primordial, being timelessly there. As an experiencing-being, I understandably feel as if Experience is first and central, and I think that’s valid. If there’s reincarnation, and I feel that it’s consistent with my metaphysics, then each next life is determined by who we subconsciously are, because there’s a life-experience story about that protagonist, who is what it takes for that system of abstract facts to be a life-experience story, and is its essential component.
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But, for full objectivity, I have to admit that the abstract logical facts that make up our life-experience possibility-stories aren’t really different from all the other abstract logical facts.
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That’s another reason why I was saying that I don’t feel that either Realism or Anti-Realism is wrong.
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I never understand what is meant by “representation”. I looked it up on the Internet, and they just referred to how the mind perceives the objective world. So I don’t suppose that it can be said that Schopenhauer, in 1818, beat Faraday to it, about the world being a system of logical facts? So maybe Faraday, in 1844, was the 1st Westerner to get that right. Score one for the English.
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Depending on from which point-of-view we look at it. But, I’d say that (during life) we’re never apart from the body and complementarity with our physical world.
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That matter of “is” reminds me of the block whose removal brings down the whole pile-structure of blocks, when it brings into question beliefs about what is…leading to those good conclusions, consequences and impressions that metaphysics points to, that we agree on—the impression of openness, looseness and lightness.
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Michael Ossipoff